


Five Ways to Live Forever

by DeCarabas



Category: Near Dark (1987)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:deconcentrate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 12:19:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On miracle transfusion cures and other near misses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways to Live Forever

"Daddy? You ever... you ever transfuse a person?"

When Loy Colton heard those words come out of his sun-burning bullet-spitting not-a-person-no-more son's mouth, images started going through his mind of Caleb sitting down to the dinner table with a nice big bag full of O-positive on ice. "What exactly are you asking me that for?"

Caleb told him.

Loy considered this. He was a good vet. His father had been a vet. He'd always tried to get Caleb to show a little interest in the work, it was solid work, but, well, he had to admit it was past time to give in and start hoping Sarah had a head for medicine.

"So you're saying you got this - infection - from the little bit of her spit in that bite."

Caleb hadn't really thought about the specifics, but he supposed so, yeah.

"And you started burning up soon as the sun rose, it spread that fast. I got this right?"

Yeah, he got that right.

"And you think a blood donation's going to clear that outta your system." He looked in the rearview mirror. "Boy, did that school sex class teach you _anything_ about STDs?"

"Can we just try-!"

"You're going to the damn hospital!"

* * *

"You comin'?"

Jesse could tell Colton was the kind of father who spent a lot of time giving orders as if they were questions. And watching Caleb now he got the impression, time was Caleb would have recognized that order, maybe grumbled a bit if it was an order he didn't particularly like, but recognized it nonetheless, gone along with it. But Mae was reaching out to the boy and calling his name, and Caleb looked back at Colton and shook his head, slow. No. "But you're going."

And then everything went to hell. Homer grabbing Sarah, the dumbass kid reacting in the only way that could be expected,

"You let her go or I'm gonna have to hurt your body, Homer."

and Diamondback standing against Caleb,

"You're gonna have to hurt _my_ body first."

and Severen holding him back,

"Remember which side of the bread your butter's on."

and Mae just standing there, looking right on the edge of rushing in to help her boy, while Jesse -

_Well, shit._

Jesse hadn't even bothered to stand up from the card table. There were few ways he could see this ending, and none of them good.

Probably would've been best to have killed the boy from the start, before Mae got so damned attached. Or possibly to have let Severen have a crack at him right off the bat - hell, the kid had finally been shaping up; that'd just been damn poor thinking on his own part, letting Mae leave the boy to stumble around sick for nights on end, the dumbass kid thinking he's got that to look forward to for the rest of time, no one bothering to mention the trick with the bullets. Been too damn long since any of them were young enough to remember how impressive that could be, the first time you got your guts splattered across the floor and found yourself still kicking.

Well. No point in thinking on should've-dones. And no easy way out of this one, but with the way Mae was clinging, there was only one thing to be done.

He gave Severen a look, and Severen, getting it, released Caleb from his grip. Before Caleb could make another lunge for Sarah, Jesse said, "Let `em go." That stopped Caleb from moving, sure enough.

Diamondback raised her eyebrows at him - then came the understanding. She stepped aside.

Homer, on the other hand, felt like taking over from Caleb to play the part of the dumbass kid tonight. "She's mi-"

"Get another fucking brat to play with. Drop her."

Jesse didn't need to bother pretending his orders were questions.

Of all the brats in all the motels in all the world - Homer'd had the girl for five fucking seconds, he'd get over it eventually. Or not. His choice. Sometimes he'd swear Homer was just fucking with him for the hell of it. Mae, on the other hand, was liable to do something uncharacteristically _stupid_ over her boy. Jesse thought of himself as a patient man, but the way she'd been handling Caleb, she was pushing it; he'd had half a mind to let Homer keep his damn kid and to hell with Caleb and Mae both, just out of sheer tiredness with putting up with their shit. But the last thing he wanted was to train another Colton from scratch.

He left it to Caleb to make the remnants of his old life get lost, while Homer pitched his inevitable tantrum. Miracle of miracles, Caleb actually got his father to at least give the appearance of giving up the chase, and Colton wasn't sounding all that likely to call the cops down on the motel in the next few hours. Not wanting to get his own son arrested and all. So understanding.

The next night they were gone soon as the sun touched the horizon, and not five minutes after they'd stolen a new car he kicked Homer, Mae and Caleb out to go hunt - _and please God, fucking kill someone already_.

With all the troublemakers off being oblivious, Jesse turned the car around and drove right back to where the old van was still burning, and he waited for Colton and his brat to catch up.

* * *

Smack in the middle of a string of lousy luck (and by lousy luck, he meant that he wasn't cheating half as well as Severen was, the bastard), Homer took three cards - no, better make it two.

Hey, three of a kind!

On the other side of Homer's motel, Sarah Colton got out of bed for a glass of water and tested the tap. Bleh. Chlorinated. She headed for the door.

"Sarah honey, where you going?" Loy asked, only half asleep. He knew he needed to get some more rest if he was going to drive through the day again, but he kept running over maps of the state in his head.

"I'm thirsty."

"There's still some soda in the fridge."

"Oh. Thank you."

So she got a soda from the fridge and went back to sleep.

* * *

"He's for you, Caleb."

He knew. She didn't have to tell him that. Caleb knew it was his turn, and Mae'd just been guiding him to it, and this guy she was dancing with - he'd thought he was jealous when he stood up, he really had, but getting this close he could _smell_ the guy and geez, you couldn't be jealous of that. This guy was - he wasn't a person. Not like Mae and Caleb were.

Did he have that backwards?

It didn't matter. He'd just punched a guy must've been twice his size and sent him clear across the room, he'd just been _shot in the stomach oh my God_ , he was going to live for fucking _ever_ and he could kick _ass_ and this guy smelled like - he smelled like -

"No!"

The guy was gone. Out the window. Someone had just _jumped through glass_ to get away from him, holy shit, holy _shit._ He looked at Mae.

All she said was, "Go."

She didn't have to tell him that, either, his whole body was already screaming that. But it was as if that one word from her set him loose, and he was out the window.

He could _still smell him._ Whoa. It had never been like this before-

But then, no one had ever run before.

There was no thought here. The boy ran. Caleb chased. And Caleb was going to catch him; there was no question; might as well have already happened - so there was no thinking about it. There was no worrying about it. There was just the prey, there, in his reach-

In his hands.

The boy had screamed as Caleb grabbed him from behind, snagged his collar and dragged him back, dragged him down. And he was talking, begging, something that might have been "please, wait, please," and maybe if Caleb had slowed down for a minute that would have made a difference, maybe if the boy had turned to look behind him as he ran, so that Caleb had to look him in the eyes, maybe that would have changed things. But he hadn't turned, and Caleb hadn't slowed, and the momentum of the chase put the boy in his hands, yanked the boy's head back, put his throat in Caleb's teeth.

It wasn't easy. It wasn't fast. It wasn't clean. Maybe it had never been clean, but Mae always made it seem so quick, almost painless, over before they knew what hit them. A tiny little nip against his throat, that was all he remembered, practically a love bite. Diamondback's switchblade, Homer's bullet in the back. But he didn't have anything like that, and the skin of the throat resisted as he bit down, down, tearing. He knew that the blood was right there, just under the surface of the skin; he'd seen that spray sent out by one slice in the right place. But it felt harder than it had looked, and the boy in his arms struggled and screamed and choked and sobbed.

And just when he was starting to realize just how much the boy was screaming, just _what the hell he was doing -_

There. That spray. Right in his mouth. In his nose, in his face, in his eyes, but there, down his throat, and, God.

God.

* * *

Mae walked in the sunlight for the first time in four years. Caleb took her by the hand and led her into his house, and she ate solid food and wasn't sick. And in the evening he took her to be reintroduced to his horse, and the horse didn't shy away from her. She was delighted. She was so delighted that she asked Caleb if she could go for a ride into town by herself.

"Meet me there?"

So she rode down the dark streets, and she waited until the horse got frightened and tried to buck her off, and she was very thankful for her childhood riding lessons at her neighbor's ranch; it was scary how fragile she felt in her skin like this. And then she walked to the edge of the street and dug down a little bit to make sure, and she took out her pocket knife and slit the horse's throat and let the blood run down into the dirt. And she waited.

When enough pieces of Severen had reassembled to form functioning lungs and vocal cords, he asked where Caleb was. He wanted his fucking spur back.

  



End file.
